The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It was probably on Reddit or Digg. Once I found it, I started reading…
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a…
Its market cap hit $777 million and Bill Gates' net worth reached $350 million
Maybe putting the designer of the IBM PCjr in charge of this wasn't the best idea
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a…
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
History of the evolution of my C compiler and operating system for transputer when I was age 16.
A Toast to the Frood Who Really Knew Where His Towel Was
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…
GeoCities, known throughout most of 1995 as Beverly Hills Internet, is one of the first commercial internet services to make it easy for people to publish a home page on the World Wide Web.
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. Initially …
It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow's managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at
AN EXTREMELY RARE “MEGALOGRAPHY” OF THE 1ST CENTURY BC, LIKE THE FAMOUS VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES Over 100 years since the discovery of the Villa of the Mysteries, a large … keep it going
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
An exploration of efforts to create a functional emulation of NVIDIA GPUs.
A year ago I tried using an M1 iMac for work duty but its 21" screen took up too much room on my desk. After seeing Sean's video on Action Retro about putting an M4 Mac Mini inside an iMac G4 , I thought I'd give it a try.
Frederick Monsen's ethnographic photos of the American West
The Air Force Research Laboratory / Information Directorate, located at the Rome Research Site (formerly Griffiss Air Force Base), tests electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment on various airframes for blind spots in the EMC equipment, or for interference by the aircraft's external munitions on the EMC equipment…
The People, Companies and Computer Systems That Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering and Manufacturing. A "Brief" History of CAD by David E. Weisberg
Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite…
Or, the early history of Intel Corporation
"If you don't perceive using the Internet in the 2020s to be a constant fight, you have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever." Lynx br...
